In a post entitled “Why science cannot be the only way of knowing: A reply to Jason Rosenhouse” at Uncommon Descent web site, Vincent Torley writes:
The following is a short (but not exhaustive) list of background assumptions about the world, which the scientific method presupposes. Science would be impossible as an enterprise, if the vast majority of scientists did not hold these assumptions:
(a) There exists an external world, which is independent of our human minds: it’s real, regardless of whether we believe in it or not;
(b) Objects in the external world have certain identifying characteristics called dispositions, which scientists are able to investigate;
(c) Objects in the external world behave in accordance with certain mathematical regularities, which we call the laws of Nature, and which tell us how those objects ought to behave;
(d) Scientific induction is reliable: scientists can safely assume that the laws of Nature hold true at all times and places;
(e) Solipsism is false: there exist other embodied agents, with minds of their own;
(f) Communication is possible: scientists are capable of talking to one another, and sharing their observations, as well as their thoughts (or interpretations) relating to those observations;
(g) The senses are reliable, under normal conditions, within their proper domain, which means that scientists are capable of making measurements on an everyday basis;
(h) There exist standard conditions, under which ordinary people (including scientists) are routinely capable of thinking logically, making rational discourse possible;
(i) Scientists are morally responsible for their own actions – in particular, they are responsible for their decision to tell the truth about what they have observed, or to lie about it; and
(j) Scientists should not lie under any circumstances, when doing science.
Science would also collapse as an enterprise, if these background assumptions were not objectively true.
So, I wonder if Vincent’s list of assumptions that must be true is a fair summary of how scientific endeavour proceeds. I can’t see anything to dispute regarding a): Dr. Johnson’s test works well enough for me.
Point b). Don’t like the look of that word “disposition”! Why can’t we stick with characteristics, properties or observable phenomena? If “disposition” is synonymous, then, OK.
Point c) Disagree. We observe phenomena and attempt to model them mathematically. Good models are descriptive and reliably predict outcomes that fit the data. Particles and waves don’t carry rule books.
Point d) Why “safely”? Induction is a useful process in mathematics and mathematics produce good models for science. Whilst past performance does not guarantee future success, we can make provisional working assumptions until they, well, cease to work.
Point e) Back to Dr Johnson!
Point f) Communication is key to human success as a social species.
Point g) Human senses can be easily fooled. Eye-witness evidence and memory are notoriously unreliable. Nullius in verba. This is why peer review and repeatability are important aspects of scientific endeavour.
Point h) Don’t see the relevance.
Point i) Individual scientists can be mistaken, selectively ignore data that are problematic for their hypothesis, and have been known to falsify data. Repeatability is an effective counter to false claims.
Point j) Humans lie. Scientists are human. Again repeatability is there as a safeguard.
The claim that science would collapse if any of Torley’s points did not hold is not correct.
ETA grammar, ETA 2 spelling
Exactly.
Duck, dive, anything but give a direct answer?
I’m beginning to detect a bit of hostility on Gregory’s part. His posts seem a bit edgier than just intellectual arguments.
petrushka,
Can’t face the argument, attack the fantasy impression. I detect despair and (winter-age) emptiness in petrushka. Is that against the rules?
Alan Fox, thread author, apparently wants to reveal his scientistic ideology in this thread. He seems to believe there are *NO* non-scientific ways of knowing, but won’t say so directly. Why not?
This isn’t a site designed for ‘spiritual’ talk.
I agree, and I find it hard to deal with. I want to like Gregory very much, because I enjoy conversing with him, but his polemics and insults don’t make it easy.
He wasn’t even attempting to say that there are (or aren’t) non-scientific ways of knowing — he was objecting to Torley’s argument for that claim. Obviously one can think both that there are non-scientific ways of knowing and also object to Torley’s argument for that claim. (I do, as I explained above in this thread.)
“I would like to see someone brave enough to propose something specific that can be known but which is not accessible to scientific investigation.”
Well, I would say that there are things that one personally can know that are not accessible to that person’s scientific investigation. Many scientific investigations are prohibitively expensive to an individual on his own, and yet he can comprehend and understand the report of some other individual who did actually perform the scientific investigation. In that instance, he is relying on the truthfulness of the purported investigator, looking to things like his stature and longetivity in the intellectual community, the consensus of the peers of said investigator, who sign off on the results, etc. But such second-hand factors of credibility do not constitute scientific investigation themselves.
But to change the subject to knowledge in general, I would personally remove the “justified” requirement from the well worn definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”, because “justified” seems too vague. To use the previous example, what specific criteria establishes unequivocally the truthfulness/reliablity of someone’s testimony — his social acceptance among others you already accept? But a child say, for example, could “know” something to be true that his parents had told him, e.g. “the guy living in that house down the street is a bad man, never go in his house”, and the child could hold that belief in his mind as if it were a fact, and if it were in fact a fact, then I would say that child had true knowledge.
To take a different tack, some Cassini scientist could wake up one morning and testify quite confidently that they knew for a fact that Saturn has a minor moon called Rhea, not knowing that Rhea had in fact been completely destroyed by some extremely rare cosmological event the night before (e.g. asteroid or whatever.) When can one ever rule out some extremely rare event or factor totally demolishing some piece of set-in-concrete knowledge which a person heretofore has held as such in their own minds. Ultimately you don’t “know” anything. You believe things, and that’s all. And the basis for such beliefs I think probably often boils down to very intrinsic common-sensical axioms innate to us all, e.g. “If some event E is observed to happen over and over and over under a set of conditions X, then it will always occur under those conditions”. No, it won’t necessarily — there could be an extremely rare condition Z, that when it finally occurs prohibits E from happening, regardless of the presence of X.
It often comes down to a sniff test, your gut, “B.S meter” or what have you. Its an inductive process in your own mind occurring over time — you hear two sides debating a point over months or years until finally an epiphany starts to dawn in your mind regarding which side has the truth, e.g. I am not in a position to fully explain or defend the various radiometric dating techniques employed by paleontologists, geologists, etc, but still eventually come to the strong but nevertheless provisional belief that they’re right. That’s the best knowledge (stated as some specific proposition) can ever be — strong provisional belief. Covering old ground for most of you guys here undoubtedly, sans the correct epistemological terms from philosophy.
[Edit: I think that “creationists” often naively rely on this proposition that true knowledge is impossible, when they attempt to throw hypothetical monkey wrenches into scientific theories (e.g. radioactive decay may not be constant or whatever). I am not siding with them on that, because one could turn around and use the same principle against their theories (such as they are).]
“Beyond reasonable doubt” — that’s the best you can do, actual knowledge doesn’t exist. I guess those five paragraphs I wrote boil down to that. Maybe this whole thread is on a much higher plane than I even realize though, and you’re all rolling your eyes.
Just now read most of the article over there at UD, so thought I’d comment on a specific passage from it:
4. In addition to the above, there exists a class of statements known as synthetic a priori truths, whose truth we can know without doing any science at all. Some examples:
(a) while causes which generate effects may precede those effects, or be simultaneous with those effects (e.g. a head lying on a pillow, in which it produces an indentation), it is impossible for such causes to come after their effects;
(b) space can have a positive integral number of dimensions (e.g. 1, 2, 3, …), but it cannot have a negative number of dimensions, a fractional number of dimensions, or an imaginary number of dimensions;
(c) the flow of time is objectively real, which means that scientists’ decisions, which are made in time, really do matter in the scheme of things; and
(d) the same object cannot be red all over and green all over, at the same time.
I’m not going to offer a general account of how we know these things without doing any experiments. All I will say is that if you claim to have knowledge of any of these truths, then you have committed yourself to an extra-scientific mode of knowledge.
—————————
I would say every single one of those “a priori” facts are seriously challenged by someone, somewhere. a) — Quantum experiments are done to try to identify causes that come after there effects. b) If some theoretical scientist wanted to study the implications of a universe with negative or imaginary dimensions, I’m sure they would do it. It seems probable that someone has done it. c) There was a whole episode of “Through the Wormhole” discussing several theoreticians who do not accept that the flow of time is objectively real. d) The color red-green is simultaneously red all over and green all over.
If Alan Fox wanted to say he believes there are non-scientific ways of knowing, he could simply buck up and say it plainly. Torley’s basic challenge to Rosenhouse is sound. Matzke makes the same point contra Rosenhouse’s scientism. To people who close their ears, the soundness won’t get through.
Right to the main point of Torley’s thread – scientism: “is the philosophical notion which refuses to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences; and it relegates religious, theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere fantasy.”
Alan Fox may have been responding to Torley’s argument for non-scientific knowledge, but I asked Alan directly what he thought and he gave, in his own words “a bit of a poor answer.”
But it wasn’t even an answer at all to the question: “Iow, you do think there is other ‘knowledge’ than ‘scientific knowledge’ or you do not?”
And simply deconstructing the question and playing with terms does not qualify as answering the question. It’s simple and straightforward enough for anyone who has studied even a basic level of philosophy of science and/or knowledge.
As for detecting phantom hostility, perhaps KN was sitting on thorns when he wrote that. If people don’t respond to one’s questions, it often means dialogue isn’t welcome. For atheists and agnostics who hold to the ideology of scientism, it gets uncomfortable to hear scientism openly challenged. Some people here (e.g. Neil) are still in denial about it.
Torley’s flimsy PoS doesn’t matter much if his main point is conceded.
Alan’s “Indeed! Gregory? Anyone?” was provocation based on petrushka’s scientistic rhetoric. Why fuel that?
Anyone here ready to admit “claims that there are non-scientific ways of knowing can be trusted” would settle the issue.
Well, there’s an example.
Science does not give us any ability to judge what’s a gratuitous insult. So my ability to recognize that for what it is, is knowledge that does not come from science.
I accept this as a serious attempt to answer my question about things that can’t be studied by science.
First of all, addressing aesthetics. What is wrong with fantasy? I wish I could refrain from pointing out that there are sciences of aesthetics. Perhaps I could mention that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were schooled in the Flemish school of composition, and that there were very well worked out rules.There were even rules for breaking the rules. All Eurocentric composition — including Rock and Jazz, descend from the Flemish school, with modification.
There are, of course, vast armies of market researchers figuring out what people like and why. Justin Bieber is a fine example of the success of scientifically designed aesthetics. Not to your taste, perhaps, but music in the classical tradition sells to less than five percent of the market.
I won’t address theology, because II don’t know of anything in religion, other than history of religion, that could be considered knowledge. This would be a good place for a theist to jump in and correct me.
I have already discussed ethics and morality.I think they are best understood as products of evolution. Since they deal with consequences of behavior, and since consequences are complex and difficult to predict, I think we could do with a bit of scientific reasoning in the implementation of morals and ethical rules.
petrushka
I won’t address theology, because II don’t know of anything in religion, other than history of religion, that could be considered knowledge.
The mystical experience of being ” born again” , being touched by the Holy Spirit. Divine revelation.
For the record, I know that I sort of indicated a week ago I would provide a response to davehooke’s “17 reasons to reject Christianity”, but on purely objective grounds, I couldn’t refute everything he was saying, and a few of those issues he presented I actually struggle with myself, as a Christian. But something you have to understand about scripture, especially with regard to say, Jesus’ parables, etc, is that there is a specific intent to weed out the scoffers by presenting things in a seemingly implausible way. I would say there is something of this same methodology in Zen, where seemingly preposterous contradictions are presented to the novice to meditate on (which in my mind also explains some of the seeming contradictions in the New Testament — truth is arrived at possibly through a synthesis of seeming contradictions.
But anyway, just an explanation in passing why I never responded to davehooke. But as to your points above:
I would say that the teachings of Solomon in the Old Testament (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) are reflective of a practical systematic methodology he employed over a lifetime to discern what is right and what is wrong, and what is wise for mankind to do on earth. In the first couple of chapters of Ecclesiastes, he references specifically a research program he undertook to discern all these things, you can read it for yourself. Maybe in Proverbs he doesn’t spell out his methodology for discovering all these maxims he’s presenting, but presumably its similar to Ecclesiastes in that regard.
But really, what methodology does one need other than a lifetime of experience. It reminds me of someone’s grandpa trying to admonish his grandson the best way to go about something, to go through life, and the grandson says, “Well how do you know all this, prove it” And the grandfather replies, I can’t tell you exactly, except I’ve been around a long time and seen a lot of things.” I would say that grandson would be pretty foolish to reject the advice based on some faux appeal to the scientific method or peer-reviewed results or what have you. That’s the best I can do at the moment.
JT:
JT,
How can you reliably tell the difference between “seemingly implausible” and “actually implausible”? And if you give the benefit of the doubt to the Christian scriptures, then why not to the Book of Mormon, the Guru Granth Sahib, etc.?
Any belief system can be rationalized if you are willing to whitewash implausibilities as only “seeming” implausibilities. The right question to ask yourself is not “Can I reinterpret these things in a way that will allow me to hang on to Christianity?” — it’s “What is most likely to be true?”
I’ve been there. The big step comes when you decide that instead of trying to rationalize your current beliefs, you are simply going to look for the truth, come what may, whether that search leads you back to Christianity or in a totally different direction.
It helped me immensely when I realized that a truly just and loving God would never fault me for sincerely seeking the truth to the best of my (presumably God-given) abilities — even if I mistakenly concluded that he did not exist. It’s up to God to provide enough evidence to lead honest searchers to him. If he doesn’t, then it’s a sign that he either doesn’t exist at all or that it simply isn’t important to him whether we believe in him or not.
There’s no guarantee that God is just and loving, of course, and if he’s not, then we’re all potentially screwed. An unloving God could just as easily turn on a believer as on a non-believer.
Or, as I finally decided, God probably doesn’t exist at all and we just have to handle things on our own.
There are reasons I will not discuss that. I will only say that in my opinion, private revelations are not reliable knowledge. I may reliably know that I perceived something, that that does not make it knowledge. This is actually close to the most important reason for scientific methodology.
I’m suspicious of how quickly “religious, theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge” are being run together here.
(And given Torley’s other concerns, I surmise that the absence of “mathematical” here is a mere oversight. And what about fiction? If I say that Batman got his powers when he bitten by a radioactive bat, surely I’ve said something false! But how can one say something false about something that doesn’t exist?)
In general, I’m suspicious of inflating useful distinctions into useless dichotomies or dualisms. There are all sorts of useful distinctions that need to be carefully distinguished from each other: objective/subjective, absolute/relative, a priori/a posteriori, internalist/externalist, knowing-how/knowing-that, analytic/synthetic . . . [not an exhaustive list!]
In one sense of “knowledge,” I know that 3+5=8, that slavery is immoral, that I have some weird neuroses about sexual intimacy, that Rilke’s poetry is beautiful, that I’m looking at a coffee-cup next to me as I type, that democracy and capitalism are probably not compatible over the long term, that physical objects don’t disappear when I’m not looking at them but that dreams disappear when I wake up — and I also know that the the continents drifted into present configuration over millions of years, that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor, and that human beings and dinosaurs did not co-exist.
(And there’s a sense of “knowledge”, distinct from all these, in which my cats know where the litter-box is and when they’re about to be fed. No doubt there are lots of things that I know in that sense, too!)
So seen that way, I certainly would reject “scientism” — I accept all kinds of knowledge apart from scientific knowledge (ethical, aesthetic, phenomenological, reflective self-knowledge, literary, mathematical . . . ). [I am omitting theological knowledge here because nothing is gained in clarity if we conflate the debate over scientism with the debate about atheism.]
But, on the other hand, I do think that empirically well-confirmed causal explanations are a more reliable kind of knowledge with regard to observable phenomena than most so-called “traditional” knowledge — e.g. about the history of life on Earth, the causes and effective treatments of physical and mental disease, or the social policies most likely to reduce unwanted pregnancies. And I think that if someone insists on making a claim about observable phenomena which can be shown to be false by empirically well-confirmed causal explanations, then he or she is in error.
Does that I mean that I do embrace some kind of “scientism” after all?
What this shows, I think, is that the notion of “scientism” is simply too vague to do all the work it’s being called upon to do. We would need to make a lot of different distinctions, for different purposes, to clear it up.
That’s enough for me, then. It answers the point that “claims that there are non-scientific ways of knowing can be trusted”. It is a joke on this site that others can’t say the same.
You admit the presence of theological knowledge, but state that:
I agree that the two should not be conflated. However, I’m sure you’ll also agree that scientism (e.g. as in the quote above) has a significant influence on many atheists. I would add that the worldview of many atheists is functionally based on scientism. This has been displayed at TSZ many times and by many participants. It is one of the key planks of ‘skepticism’ offered here, where there are several ‘practising’ scientists.
The key is not to turn support from ’empirical explanations’ into the ideology of empiricism, as you seem so willing to do. As human beings we simply have to live with unreliable knowledge, even while we seek reliable knowledge. The main figures you cite (your NIT tournament team) are not the best examples of helping you understand that empiricism is a chain on the human heart, not its emancipator. Solomon’s wisdom, that JT cites, is a much greater example, and he was Jewish too.
You appear to flirt with it, yes. It seems this is one of your admitted “weird neuroses about sexual intimacy.” You seem to want to validate your philosophy with science, rather than enabling a healthy balance between science, philosophy and theology/worldview.
What do you think it’s being called to do? It’s a clear enough term that has been used for at least 60 years for a meaningful purpose to define a particular ideology that some people hold. Those who promote scientism and tie it intimately into their worldview are usually the ones who stomp their feet, raise their voices and deny such a thing exists (or say that it is ‘too vague’). They do not read the literature about it and they just ignore scholarly work done on it (i.e. not just low-grade YEC culture war sneers). They do not want to hear that it has been debunked.
That’s what allows a guy like Neil to protest “I have never understood what ‘scientism’ means,” as if that’s an actual contribution to conversation. Go read a book then and heal yourself of this lack of understanding. Spend 10 hours reading serious articles like Artigas (philosopher) (http://www.unav.es/cryf/past2003.html#titre9) or Hughes (biologist) (http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism) or Hutchinson (natural science and engineering) (http://biologos.org/blog/monopolizing-knowledge-part-1-science-and-scientism) or (http://monopolizingknowledge.net/). Stop wasting our time telling us what you don’t know and don’t care to learn.
Thanks KN for answering what Alan Fox has so far failed to do.
I have nothing against the inner life, but I wouldn’t call it knowledge.
And what about fiction? If I say that Batman got his powers when he bitten by a radioactive bat,
Spiderman, Batman has no powers, just technology
Even fictional references can be “not even false.”
But seriously, why would anyone want to call private perception or experience knowledge? I’m just a lowly layman, but I would want to reserve that word for things that can be passed on to other people. One only has to visit a courtroom to see how precarious eyewitness testimony is without corroboration..
I wouldn’t be so bold as to claim there are “no non-scientific ways of knowing” anything, and I would suggest scientific knowledge is provisional and subject to review. I do think (and have already said in this thread) that the only way to find things out about the external world, the real world, is to examine it with our collective senses and shared experience, enhanced with the instruments we have at our disposal.
Frankly, I am unable to get my head round the whole “other ways of knowing” concept.
ETA too many “I thinks”
Two distinct statements. Your “I wouldn’t be so bold” is a halfway answer. Care to take another step toward the affirmative regarding ‘non-scientific knowledge’? The second part is obvious, repeated often and requires no comment.
Why is the ‘internal world’ not also ‘real’? Einstein thought it was. As do most Abrahamic believers.
Volumes have been written about this, predominantly (like most things) not just by atheists and agnostics. I recommend both McLuhan (Abrahamisty) and Postman (agnostic) for treatment.
Yes, that’s understandable. First, you’re not a philosopher. Second, you’re a native English speaker who lives in France. Many in the ‘west’ have come to equivocate between ‘science’ and ‘knowledge.’ For them/you, ‘knowing’ doesn’t mean a thing except ‘thinking scientifically.’ It’s a crying shame of ideological myopia imo. What is needed is to study the ‘science of science,’ which originated in the ‘east.’
I’ve already provided many links on this topic. Readiness to engage them (e.g. M. Artigas) is up to your will, not just your mind/brain.
So far the examples have been unpersuasive.
I find it interesting that the linked screeds against scientism tend to be written by people whose institutions employ or protect child rapists. Weren’t we asked to agree that child abuse is self-evidently bad?
Sorry, but I don’t get it. I can know that green is green, one plus one equals two, and so forth, but all this knowledge washes away like tears in rain, if it can’t be preserved in a social context.
I’ve not yet been given convincing reasons to think there is not a real world beyond the internal world within my own head. Solipsism is a childish concept. However I doubt I could establish any kind of proof that would convince a solipsist (other than perhaps a swift Johnson-like kick). Pragmatism works very well for me and I do not insist everyone else must adopt it. I care much more about the free exchange of ideas than trying to promote a particular view.
Good catch, Gregory: the implied dichotomy! I just meant to distinguish between what goes on in my head and what goes on beyond it. There’s nothing in my head that is made from different stuff; the point is I have unique access to it.
Et alors!
Et alors!
I probably have a broader concept of science than some. Rather than give me a reading list, suggest a way of knowing something outside my head that does not involve some sort of scientific process.
Show me, express yourself plainly and clearly, that you understand what ‘scientism’ is, that you acknowledge it, and a rainbow of ‘suggest me’ will follow. ‘Science’ is quite obviously (even to people untrained in philosophy or sociology of science) a social construct, after all.
But I don’t accept “Scientism” is other than a contrived pejorative term. It may be true, in some sense, that science is a social construct, if you mean that the scientific method and scientific endeavour were created by people, but that is not all it is. Space aliens, were they to exist and could they visit Earth, would be able to compare scientific notes. Properties of real phenomena are not limited to human study only.
How science get to the knowledge that green is green and one plus one equals two?
Those were intended as examples of non-scientific knowing.
Larry Moran at his Sandwalk blog also muses on other ways of knowing.
So, you don’t care or want to elevate your thinking or discover the accurate non-pejorative meanings?
No wonder!
You’re just a pedestrian, repeating the same old childish nonsense of a ‘singular’ thing called ‘the’ wrt scientific methods. While people are here to watch the races. So, sit by and watch, Alan, because you obvious have nothing and want nothing to contribute. Other people are more curious and capable (though quite obviously not most people here at TSZ re: scientism b/c they embrace it).
Ever heard of the ‘Extended Mind’ thesis, Alan? The key is that is doesn’t disqualify the soul. Only ‘skepticism’ or a variety of crude -isms pretend that it does.
My problem is that science is not in any way in conflict with art and music and literature. These are non-issues.
Science does challenge the authority of religious institutions by questioning the veracity of religious authority. We see this in subject of evolution, where science conflicts with the authority of revealed religions to describe the history of the universe and the history of life.
Now the tricky part. If religion has no authority over statements of fact, then from whence does it derive its authority over morality and ethics?
I would say it has no authority. Theists stand exactly equal with everyone else in the marketplace of moral and ethical ideas. Some individuals may be smarter or wiser or better educated than others, but that is independent of their status as theists.
Science also stands equal to, but not taller than other disciplines in these arenas.
But science does have one advantage. It is better able to deal with the consequences of actions. It has no magical authority to decide what we should value, but it does have some advantages in figuring out how to achieve goals.
Didn’t we have an entire thread on Extended Mind?
Perhaps someone needs a mental extension.
Not till now. But David Chalmers came up with “philosophical zombies” I see.
I have no idea what a “soul” might be.
“Didn’t we have an entire thread on Extended Mind?”
Link it please. Think you’re wrong.
“I have no idea what a ‘soul’ might be.”
No imagination or feeling?
Yeah, there appear to be a lot of zombie-skeptics here at TSZ.
I don’t find “extended mind” at TSZ.
What matters isn’t whether science is a social construct, but whether “social construction” goes ‘all the way down.’ There’s a substantive difference between “the social construction of reality” and “the construction of social reality”.
The Big Worry is that if everything — reality itself — is “socially constructed,” then what is it constructed out of? What are the ‘raw materials’? What happens to mountain ranges, water, animals, plants? Saying that reality itself is socially constructed turns society into the transcendental subject, and all the attendant problems.
Now, saying that science is a kind of social knowledge is quite different — and, by my lights, perfectly correct. (Additional sources: The Fate of Knowledge, also by Longino;
Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal by Heather Douglas, Science in a Democratic Society and Science, Truth and Democracy by Philip Kitcher, and Defending Science, Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism by Susan Haack.)
Looking back on “the science wars” from the theoretical perspective I currently deploy, I take it to have been a legacy of logical positivism as to why anyone should have thought that the acknowledging the complex interplay of values and power in the social processes of scientific practice is inconsistent with accepting that scientific practices do get at how the world really is, and that revision and abandonment of previous scientific theories are (usually) undertaken for good reasons. (On this last point, see Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason.)
petrushka,
That’s because you were wrong.
It would be more appropriate, KN, for you to say “by my darks” than to say “by my lights.” Your philosophism smells ‘skeptic’ at TSZ and contributes to the darkness. A ‘skeptic’ is not usually a person who brings ‘light,’ but rather doubts. You seem to fit appropriately here as TSZ’s lone philosopher. Unfortunately, your NIT team is coached by a J.V. novice who rejects the reality of his own ethnicity-religion. You’ve got ‘Don’t trust!’ written on the back of your uniforms.
Gregory,
I’ve done my level best to treat you with respect and cordiality. I’ve even tried to like you, though I don’t know why. But your constant barbs and snarky dismissals have finally gotten under my skin. We’re done.
This is the essence of my issue with religion. The claim of authority. This unjustified claim of authority. If theists were content to just be theists, they would get no complaint from me. Live and let live. But when they want to interfere in the lives of other people who are unpersuaded by their assertions, they need to be firmly rebuffed.
Time for me to repeat that religious claims deserve no more respect than advertising claims?
@ KN
I have resisted an impulse to “yellow card” in a thread that I am participating and had started. I don’t understand why Gregory manages to irritate almost everyone he interacts with on-line but at least that means you don’t need to take it personally. It’s just Gregory’s way!
@ Gregory
Your comment timed at 8.55pm deserves moving to guano.
ETA correct error
There is more than one accurate, non-pejorative meaning for “scientism”? Looking at the wikipedia entry on scientism (Dennett takes the pejorative route, I note 🙂 ) which of the non-pejorative meanings (among the pejorative caricatures that represent positions that I have seen nobody take or support) given do you think is the most appropriate for me to take on board? Or do you have an alternative that is not mentioned?
I’m glad you resisted.
I agree with your assessment. But I don’t plan moving it.
You are correct that this is “just Gregory’s way”. I don’t think anybody is taking it seriously, other than Gregory himself.
What a negative and narrow view of skepticism! By remaining skeptical, we enable better explanatory models to come forward and allow sufficiently good models to re-affirm themselves. Science itself is skeptical, holding findings provisionally – and also surviving experimental disconfirmation is also a form of skepticism, requiring the hypothesis to actually deliver. Get yourself into a good HPSS course to learn up about these things, Greg.
Gregory,
Perhaps not, but if you’re speaking of the “standard” immaterial soul, then there is plenty of other evidence to disqualify it.
If you eventually get tired of insulting people in this thread, you might want to ask yourself if your concept of the soul holds up to scrutiny. Here is a relevant thread:
Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul
keiths,
Split brains does not debunk the concept of soul. Anyone with half a brain (pun intended) knows that memories are not localized but distributed across hemispheres.
So asking the right hemisphere “do you believe in God?’, you will get a response based on the right hemisphere’s reconstruction of the (composite) memory, missing those parts stored in the left hemisphere. So the right brain is answering based on partial information. It could very well be that the part of the memory the right hemisphere stored were doubts about the existence of God. Where as the left hemisphere may have perhaps stored experiences that could be chalked up as affirming God.
Therefore, there is no contradiction in the right hemisphere saying no and the left hemisphere saying yes. Rather split brains simply tells us more about the nature of how the brain stores and distributes information. Nothing more.
Does that count as progress, that Alan Fox has actually taken a few minutes to read a Wikipedia entry about ‘scientism’?
I linked to 3 significant papers (including a book) above about ‘scientism’. Maybe Alan will take some more of his time to read them? KN in another thread gave no acknowledgment that he’d read Artigas; it’s convenient for his philosophistic position to keep ignoring it (but he continues to not know why I barb and dismiss him- do your research and stop fuddling with NIT teams!). Those links provide information, knowledge and interpretation that Alan is now asking me to write here. Sorry, I don’t have the luxury of that time. The articles are there to be read.
Celebrating Dennett is like celebrating despair in human life; certainly not ‘inspiring’ and not ‘fantastic’ even for a Fox.
p.s. Andy Clark co-authored “The Extended Mind” (1998) with Chalmers. He seems to be much more interesting than mere ‘zombies’.
Gregory,
I am puzzled. I see at most a couple of posters here who espouse “Scientism”, as defined by your linked articles. Not “many”.
Perhaps you could take the time to provide your definition of “Scientism”. It might help move the conversation along. Specific examples of the negative effects thereof would help, but I understand you are a busy man.
Alternatively, you could stick with argument by vague, unfounded assertion and seemingly random insult. Your choice.